Well, I suppose this was inevitable in a country where media literacy is more of a white elephant than a reality.
Throughout the past few days, I noticed several bizarre AI-generated images doing the rounds on social media.
Though they are presented as caricatures amounting to “light-hearted” political commentary, the fact that the content in the group and the admin profiles are entirely AI-generated suggests that they may not be so innocuous.
The Facebook group – named Are you being served or robbed? (Malta News) – has amassed more than 1,700 members in less than a year. With over a hundred posts this past month alone, it is a very active echo chamber.
While it’s clear that the group is flooded with AI slop and is administrated by fake profiles, it is not yet known who is behind this group or why it was set up to begin with.
What is certain is that all these profiles were created throughout last summer and they all began posting the same material in the same group at the same time, indicating a high degree of social engineering.
The only recurring theme in the formulaic posts that drive most of the group’s engagement is that they pick up on hot-button political issues with alarming speed.
The admins behind the group also constantly share their posts to other, larger Facebook groups. Besides sharing odd caricatures and somewhat nonsensical comic strips, the admins also regularly post one-liner statements which bear the hallmarks of engagement farming.
Some of the AI-generated posts shared in the fake Facebook group named Are you being served or robbed? (Malta News).
Some of the AI-generated posts shared in the fake Facebook group named Are you being served or robbed? (Malta News).
Engagement farming is the use of techniques like these bot accounts and the massive amount of AI content they can generate to exploit Facebook’s algorithm.
In turn, the influence generated by this online activity can be used for malicious purposes, ranging from scamming victims who unknowingly engage with fake content to engineering misinformation about an election.
The idea is to stimulate what feels like real engagement and breed some level of familiarity among members of the group interacting with each other. Once that base layer of trust is established, a potential victim would more easily lower their guard enough to share sensitive information.
AI-generated images can be identified because of artificial intelligence’s tendency to “hallucinate” mistakes that a careful observer with some basic knowhow would not miss so easily.
This morning, I decided to have a closer look at who was behind this group.
None of the eight admin profiles listed in the Facebook group actually look like real people – though they’ve certainly posted enough to fool dozens of real users into interacting with them regularly.
Different AI image detectors tested by this website to confirm our suspicions about two of the most prolific posters in the group, Jessica Serracino and Elena Farrugia, concluded with “99% certainty” that the profile pictures they have were also generated by AI.
For the sake of thoroughness, we did reach out to one of the admins to confront them with our findings but did not receive a response by the time of writing. We welcome any evidence that can prove our suspicions are incorrect.
The admin profiles for the Facebook group named Are you being served or robbed? (Malta News).